Write an essay explaining the connection between democratic institutions, personalism and populism in current Nicaragua.
Colburn and Cruz argue that Nicaragua presents an interesting case of a democracy mixed with personalism and populism. Write an essay explaining the connection between democratic institutions, personalism and populism in current Nicaragua. Please provide evidence to support your essay. Note: You have to read the article by Colburn and Cruz to answer this question.
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Get Help Now!Populism has focused on the ways in which charismatic leaders trade economic benefits for political support and their ability
to smother political institutions.1 But the Nicaraguan case suggests that
attention should also be given to the other end of the polity—namely,
the absence in the general population of a democratic culture that offers
needed support for political institutions. In Nicaragua, the scarcity of
informed, engaged, and exacting citizens—participants in politics—is
an important part of the explanation for the persistence of personalism
and populism. Daniel Ortega to office despite a constitutional ban
on consecutive terms—offers a example of the persistence of
personalism .
Notwithstanding its Sandinista revolution in the 1980s and subsequent
transition to democracy, Nicaragua continues its historical predilection
for being dominated politically by powerful individuals. Nicaragua is nominally a liberal democracy. Yet that label masks the degree to which the nation-state is dominated by powerful individuals.
In all political systems, there are (or have been) charismatic personalities. When these personalities become all-important and overshadow institutions, however, the polity is altered, inevitably becoming oligarchic. In Latin America, this phenomenon, long-recognized as a “fact of life,” is known as personalismo (personalism).Personalism is not a regime type but a form of political behavior that can seemingly infect—or even overwhelm—a wide range of regime types. Personalism is most commonly associated with authoritarian regimes; understandably, it seems most compatible with dictatorship. Indeed, Nicaragua offers the striking example of the Somoza dynasty: a father and his two sons who successively governed the country from the mid-1930s until their regime fell in 1979 to an insurrection by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) Personalism is thought to be largely incompatible with other kinds of regime types—above all, those two assumed to bracket authoritarianism on the political continuum, the revolutionary “socialist” state and liberal democracy. Nicaragua today, however, presents a case where personalism is pervasive, undermining the legitimacy (or “purity”) of the revolutionary aspirations of the Sandinistas, as well as corrupting the liberal ideals of the country’s incipient democracy and the Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC), whose nomenclature would suggest a great affinity for democracy.
The case of Nicaragua—whose citizens in November 2011 returned former revolutionary leader and incumbent president Daniel Ortega to office despite a constitutional ban on consecutive terms— example of the persistence of personalism . The case of Nicaragua suggests that, at least in small, poor countries, personalism is likely to enhance “governability” by offering a certain degree of stability—someone, after all, assumes clear responsibility for meeting the elementary needs of public administration. There is governance. The confusion of countless institutions and myriad political transactions is swept aside. Residents know who governs—there is a face and a name (or a handful of faces and names). Those who are dominant are visible and thus can be held somewhat accountable.
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